Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Obama and the Courts, WSJ

One of the great unappreciated stories of the past eight years is how thoroughly Senate Democrats thwarted efforts by President Bush to appoint judges to the lower federal courts...Consider the most important lower federal court in the country: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his two terms as president, Ronald Reagan appointed eight judges, an average of one a year, to this court. They included Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Kenneth Starr, Larry Silberman, Stephen Williams, James Buckley, Douglas Ginsburg and David Sentelle. In his two terms, George W. Bush was able to name only four...Although two seats on this court are vacant, Bush nominee Peter Keisler has been denied even a committee vote for two years. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will almost certainly fill those two vacant seats...The net result is that the legal left will once again have a majority on the nation's most important regulatory court of appeals...The balance will shift as well on almost all of the 12 other federal appeals courts...On the Supreme Court, six of the current nine justices will be 70 years old or older on January 20, 2009. There is a widespread expectation that the next president could make four appointments in just his first term, with maybe two more in a second term. Here too we are poised for heavy change...These numbers ought to raise serious concern because of Mr. Obama's extreme left-wing views about the role of judges. He believes -- and he is quite open about this -- that judges ought to decide cases in light of the empathy they ought to feel for the little guy in any lawsuit....Obama's 'Redistribution' Constitution, Stephen Calabresi, The Wall Street Journal, 10/28/2008

You know, the little guy who doesn't like guns, the little guy who wants his pregnant girlfriend to have an abortion, the little guy who claims that the finger he scalded at a fast food restaurant is worth ten million dollars, the little guy who wants to sue General Electric because a UFO landed on his porch...don't be fooled. Most of all the "little guy" is a Democrat after money someone else has earned.